I say that magic is hope. Those who are called Tiranish must ever pursue Truth for, through the Light of Truth, any man may achieve greatness in God’s eyes.
—The Leonid, Meditations, Verse 30 (2 of Tiran)
Witch’s Well
ciona’s bed was deep and cloud-soft after a week on her cot at theS laboratory, but sleep wouldn’t come. Communication tower conduit lights blinked off the mist on the window, transfixing her. In the distance, she could just hear the boom and hum of the factories that operated through the night. Like those machines, Sciona’s mind just couldn’t stop running, turning each of Thomil’s claims through the gears.
I know these runes you use in your magic…The Venholt Endrastae use these symbols in their oldest naming and divination rituals…The great magic practitioners of the Pre-Tiran Kwen were all women.
A few months ago, when Sciona didn’t know any Kwen personally, she would have said that the people from beyond the barrier made things up all the time. They were ignorant, easily ruled by emotion and illusion. They didn’t even worship the true God. But she knew Thomil. He was smart, he thought through his claims carefully, and he wasn’t one for lying.
As she lay with her eyes open to the fogged window, Sciona thought back on everything she had ever read about Kwen witches—not that there was much to review. Tiranish scholars rarely expended ink on women in general, let alone barbarian ones from beyond the limits of civilization. But if the Kwen women they called witches had, in fact, been mages, practicing similar magic to the Tiranish—
Sciona sat straight up in bed.
There was something she needed to check.
—
“Going so soon?” Aunt Winny looked forlorn as Sciona tore through the lamplit kitchen the next morning. “I’m making waffles for breakfast.”
“Next week, Auntie.” Sciona gave her aunt a peck on the cheek. “I’ve
got to catch the early train back.”
“Back?”
“To the University.”
“Why?” Aunt Winny asked as Sciona crammed her feet into her boots
and sat to lace them up.
“Because of windows!”
“What?”
“It’s just that I was trying to think of mentions of witches in old books.
And people always wrote about witches ‘opening windows,’ which the writers thought was some kind of scrying or divination, but what if it wasn’t, Auntie? What if it was mapping? What if those windows opened to the Otherrealm?”
Aunt Winny frowned in a mixture of confusion and concern—the way she always did when Sciona talked about magic with unwomanly animation. “What does heathen witchcraft have to do with your research?”
“That’s what I’m going to find out,” Sciona said and sighed fondly as Aunt Winny made a sign against evil in the air before her.
“Such talk in my house! And so close to Feryn’s Feast, Sciona! I don’t want my precious niece incurring any curses.”
“You can’t activate a curse by reading,” Sciona said, tying off the lace on her second boot.
Aunt Winny made a disapproving noise. “You never know when it comes to dark arts from beyond the barrier, do you?”
“Magic is my area, Auntie.” Sciona stood and slung her bag over her shoulder. “I’m pretty sure I know what I’m doing. Tell Alba I love her!” she
called as she rushed out the door into the misty dark of the morning.
—
The fourth floor of the library was blessedly empty when Sciona arrived.
Under the cozy buzz of lamplight, she ran a finger along a row of spines and pulled the autobiography of Highmage Jurowyn. The eccentric traveling mage had risked Blight to map the far reaches of the Kwen shortly after Tiran’s barrier went up and shortly before such travels became illegal.
Many of Jurowyn’s contemporaries and successors had dismissed his accounts, accusing him of fabricating the more fantastical elements—the cliffside cities that rivaled Tiran in size, the shape-shifting sages with their bodies wound round with tattoos, the wolves the size of horses. But, fanciful or not, Jurowyn’s writings represented some of the only firsthand accounts of the Kwen in the Latter Age of Founders, and Sciona scanned voraciously until she landed on a passage of interest:
I would most vehemently contest my colleagues’ condemnation of Kwen magics as “dark” and “sinister.” While there are surely sinister elements to this little-known art, so too are there sinister uses for any trade or tool. In my travels, I have come to know the Kwen magic practitioner: a humble woman, busy among the herbs and candles of her warren, keeping the home, caring for the sick, and protecting her family.
That part aligned with what Thomil had said of Kwen magic: it was mostly mothers, daughters, and sisters using their abilities in service of the community.
I have found witches applying their skills to all manner of things good and small. A kindly crone who shared her hut with me upon a fall evening showed me a divining spell by which she received visions from other worlds. With but a few runic lines on a flattened
stone, she could summon moving, breathing images from a realm beyond our own, rendering in such exquisite detail every form and figure that a man might think he gazed through a glass. What this realm was, the crone could not explain, for she had not the language.
A somewhat less agreeable witch in the next settlement told me that she used the same magic to watch over her sons whenever they struck out hunting to ensure no harm befell them. However, when I requested a demonstration, she coldly told me that such spells were for the eyes of family and not for strangers. Throughout the rest of my stay, I pressed for a demonstration to no avail.
Another book, penned a decade later by a Highmage Eristidel, mentioned a similar phenomenon:
It is well known that the witches beyond the barrier once opened clear windows both to our own world and worlds beyond.
“Well known?” Sciona muttered in annoyance. Kwen magical practices may have been “well known” in Eristidel’s time, but it took Sciona a full day of scouring the library to come up with additional sources mentioning anything more on the subject. When she finally found them, they didn’t add much. Archmage Faene the Second referred to “witch mirrors” in one text and “scrying wells” in another without elaborating on what they did nor whether these were two different types of magic.
Eristidel’s must have been the account Sciona had dimly recalled as she lay awake in Winny’s apartment, since he seemed to be the only scholar who consistently referred to these witches’ spells as “windows.” Across the few texts Sciona had found, the preferred term was “mirror.”
Highmage Hurothen wrote:
Lord Prophet Leon’s mapping spells serve a Higher Purpose than the lurid pools used by witches past to spy about, for mapping spells
are instruments of God. Comparing the two is tantamount to heresy.
Sciona lingered on those lines for a long time, chewing the inside of her cheek in thought. Hurothen might not think that witch mirrors should be compared to Tiranish mapping spells, but the assertion itself suggested that someone before or during Hurothen’s tenure had drawn a connection between the two types of magic. The claim must have existed for him to feel the need to refute it. And Hurothen had lived at a time when mages had not only heard of witch magics but seen them with their own eyes.
Sciona searched the library for the next several hours, hoping to find the sources Hurothen was referencing, but the works of most of his contemporaries had been destroyed in the library fire of 252. Whatever opinions he had been so keen to quash, they were lost to time.
“Congratulations, Hurothen,” Sciona grumbled as she let another disappointing source fall shut. “I guess you got your wish.”
Despite the dearth of information, Sciona had at least confirmed one consensus on Kwen magics: women had once used spells that allowed them to see in lifelike detail beyond their immediate surroundings. Scholars might disagree on what these witch mirrors had displayed—the mortal realm, the Otherrealm, or something beyond either—but it was the imaging magic itself that intrigued Sciona. Regardless of what Highmage Hurothen thought, that type of imaging should be applicable to the mapping of the Otherrealm. If Sciona could just discover how the Kwen witches had made their mirrors so much clearer than Tiranish mapping spells, sourcing issues could be a thing of the past.
She would have hit a frustrating dead end there, unsure where to go next, if not for a familiar source she skimmed on a whim: Highmage Raeden’s History of Magic.
In short, we can be sure that there is no link whatsoever between the heathen witches of the Kwen and the civilizing magic of our Bright Haven. To date, the only mage in history with a drop of Kwen blood was Andrethen Stravos, who deserted the mountain Kwen in his
youth, never to associate with his savage kin again, and fathered no descendants due to his infirmity.
“Of course!” Sciona breathed into the quiet of the library.
Founding Mage Andrethen Stravos of the copper hair, creator of Tiran’s barrier! Most sources didn’t acknowledge his maternal lineage out of respect for his accomplishments, but that copper hair had come from somewhere. Stravos had been half Kwen. Or was it a quarter? Maybe just a quarter, but even so… Sciona was on her feet again, stalking the shelves, pulling anything with “Stravos” or “Founding Mages” on the spine. Having died when he was barely Sciona’s age, Archmage Stravos had never penned an autobiography.
However, like most of the Founding Mages, he had many biographies, written by his peers and their students and their students. Sciona started with the one she had read during her first year at Danworth Academy, Highmage Kellen’s The Life and Works of Andrethen Stravos, written only a decade after its subject’s untimely death.
During Sciona’s school years, the introductory chapter had been a powerful inspiration:
In Stravos, we see that any person, however mean his origins or grave his infirmities, can rise to glory through God and the pursuit of Truth. For the man who grew to become Lord Prophet Leon’s right hand had the humblest of all beginnings. He was the bastard child of a Verdani trader named Doren Stravos and a mongrel witch of the Mount.
A witch of the Mount…In other words, a highmage of the Venhold Endrastae.
The boy, Andrethen, was a sickly child with poor lungs and a twisted leg that caused a severe limp.
Not hunting material, then, according to Thomil, likely to stay home with his mother, learning her arts…
In his early years, Andrethen was left to his heathen mother’s care until the witch passed on and his father, Doren Stravos, grudgingly accepted his bastard son into his household among the Verdani.
The text then went on to detail how a young Andrethen Stravos had found a mentor in benevolent Verdani visionary Leon, thrived under his tutelage, and accompanied him on his God-given mission to the Venhold Mountains as a native guide. Every source Sciona revisited mentioned this part of the story: how Archmage Leon had plucked the unwanted mongrel from obscurity and given him a chance at greatness through God.
Conspicuously, every source also agreed on one other point of detail: while Archmage Leon had received the vision and given the order for the barrier around Tiran, he had not been the one to execute the sourcing. Nor had the other sourcer among his disciples, Kaedor. In all accounts, the mage who had sourced the energy for the barrier was Leon’s devoted apprentice, Andrethen Stravos of the copper hair.
No text suggested that Stravos had written his sourcing spells under Leon’s or Kaedor’s direction, and nowhere in Leon’s writings did the Father of Tiran display an aptitude for sourcing spells powerful enough to erect a city-spanning barrier. Archmage Leon had been a genius conduit creator and a master of complex action spells, but the master sourcer had always been Stravos. Even from a young age, Stravos’s sourcing spells had been entirely his own. It stood to reason, then, that he had based them on the work of his mother, the “mongrel witch of the Mount,” where women opened windows to other realms.
Sciona had to pause for a moment, holding her head between her hands as if that could keep the riot of thoughts from spilling in every direction.
This was the vital connection between Tiranish and Kwen magics— Andrethen Stravos, the bastard mage who had set the barrier between their people for the next three hundred years. His compositions had never been
adapted for the spellograph, but they were the key to clearer mapping spells. They had to be!
Sciona clawed through her stacks of books for the master collection of Stravos’s work, but it wasn’t there.
“Seriously?” she muttered as she registered that it wasn’t on the table and rushed back to the shelves to find it.
For her whole education in magic, Sciona had been focusing on the wrong mapping spells: Kaedor and Leonic. They were tidy, teachable, and easy to apply, but they were missing visual detail. The clarity the Leonic and Kaedor Methods gained in their composition, they lost in their imaging.
In fairness to Tiran’s many generations of magical educators, there was a good reason no one referred students to Stravos’s writings for modern spellwork. Sciona herself had read what remained of his compositions, and they were needlessly arcane, often containing many lines where one would suffice. His spellwork relied so heavily on handwritten flourishes that no one in the last century had successfully adapted it for their own use.
And damn it, where was that collection? Sciona dug her fingernails into the wood of the shelf where the tome should have been. Who the Hell had needed to look at Stravos’s writings?
“So,” a voice drawled, and Sciona started so sharply she banged her arm
on the bookcase. “Hard at work, I see.”
Renthorn.
“Ah.” Sciona turned, tugging her robes straight and pulling on a smile.
“Highmage Renthorn…and Highmage Tanrel! What are you doing here?”
“We work here.” Tanrel was eyeing her in something between amusement and concern.
“Really?” She blinked. “I mean, yes. I mean—wh-what time is it?”
“It’s morning, Miss Freynan,” Highmage Tanrel said.
“Not…the morning of the twenty-second?” She squinted. It was always hard to track time with so little sunlight, but Sciona couldn’t have been here for two full days. At least she didn’t think so. She had been too lost on the page to note the sun briefly rising or sinking over the mountains outside the library windows.
“No, no.” Tanrel laughed. “It’s the twenty-first. Renthorn and I are just here to pick up a reference book to take to our meeting with Archmage Thelanra. He’s going to help us through some problems we’re having with —”
“I’ll say, as I always do, that you should join us.” Renthorn cut Tanrel off. “Better now than after the presentations. You don’t want to embarrass yourself in front of the Council.”
“And I’ll say, as I always do, that I’m doing fine on my own. Thank you.”
“Of course.” Renthorn’s smile was sour. “We’ll leave you to your, um”—he looked around at the books Sciona had stacked and strewn across multiple tables—“what is it you’re doing, exactly?”
“More important, how long has it been since you slept?” Past the mirth, there was genuine worry in Tanrel’s voice, but Sciona didn’t care. She didn’t need concern from someone who thought the archmages had let her into the High Magistry for political reasons.
“Not that long,” she lied impatiently. “Just doing some background reading to clear my head.”
“You didn’t get your fill of that the day before yesterday?” Tanrel asked.
“Day before…?” Sciona narrowed her eyes. Time had warped as she fell into her research.
“Faenesday,” Tanrel said, “when you were in here loading up on more books than you could physically carry?”
“Oh…Oh!” That was right! Sciona had been in here pulling old sourcing books for inspiration, and one of those books had been The Stravos Collection. She was the reason it wasn’t here!
“What are you researching, anyway?” Renthorn leaned over the tomes Sciona had left open on one of the tables.
A laugh started deep in Sciona’s body. Partly because she couldn’t believe she had forgotten taking The Stravos Collection from the shelf barely two days ago. Partly because Renthorn’s face was hungry in a way that said that he needed to know what she was up to—because he was running into hopeless dead ends of his own. She couldn’t stop laughing,
even as the sound rang eerily among the shelves and the other two mages looked on in unease.
“You can try to figure it out, Renthorn,” she managed through the giggles. “You can try.”
“Miss Freynan,” Tanrel said as she doubled over, gripping the back of a chair to steady herself through the laughter. “Are you quite well? Do you need help?”
“No…” She straightened up, grinning. “No…I need a cup of tea!”
Pushing past Highmage Tanrel, Sciona picked up her skirts and ran from the library.
The next several hours—then several more—passed in a whir of scribbles on notepaper and fingers on keys. If Sciona’s body tired, she didn’t feel it. How could she when each draft, each test, brought her closer to the revelation that would change Tiran forever?
The fleeting red sun had come and gone again when the laboratory door cracked open.
“Oh!” Thomil said. “You’re already here, ma’am…I was going to do some tidying before…you…Highmage Freynan, are you crying?”
Sciona hadn’t even noticed the tears rolling down her face. Nothing was real except the visual in the mapping coil before her. How long had she stood staring into it? Who could say? And what did it matter? Everything that mattered in the world was glowing inside that copper circle.
“It works,” she whispered. “This is it, Thomil! I’ve done it!”
“What?”
“Thomil, bless you! Bless you, I’ve done it!”
“Bless me? And…done what?”
“The mapping spell! The one! The mapping spell to end all others.
Look!”
Bounding to the door in sleepless mania, she grabbed Thomil’s sleeve and dragged him to the spellograph. Within the mapping coil, the results of her latest experiment stood in sharp gray-and-white glory. It was a visual of the Otherrealm like any other—except that the energy sources were crisp,
forming edges as defined as Tiran’s skyline on a clear day. “See? There’s no
way to miss the energy sources!”
“How did you figure it out, ma’am?”
“It was you, Thomil!” She tugged his arm in excitement, wanting to shake him, wanting to kiss him. “It was what you said about the Kwen mages of the mountains. I traced Founding Mage Stravos’s lineage—and I guess more important, his magical knowledge—back to the Venhold Kwen you mentioned. Then, I went back through all his curly, confusing spellwork, and I found this in his composition!” She hauled the thousand- page Stravos Collection open to the page she had marked and stabbed a finger at her discovery.
“Um—” Thomil stared down at the brittle yellow page, nonplussed.
“What am I looking at, Highmage?”
“These four lines here!” Sciona indicated a paragraph of handwritten spellwork. “None of Stravos’s students could replicate his spells with any sort of consistency, so most of his compositions fell out of common use in the first half century of Tiranish history. But these lines specifically don’t appear in any other mage’s mapping methods. Not Leon’s, not Kaedor’s, not anyone’s. Scholars couldn’t figure out what they were for and scrapped them for the sake of efficiency long before the spellograph was even invented, so chances are that no one has even tried to slot these lines into a mapping spell for over a century.”
“But you’ve figured out what they do?” Thomil said.
“It wasn’t easy. The trial and error, all the different variations I’ve been through, you wouldn’t believe!”
“No, ma’am.” Thomil looked over the masses of notes and used spellpaper spilling off the tables. “I believe it.”
“Anyway, after all that fiddling, I finally wrestled all Stravos’s cryptic little flourishes into spellograph-friendly characters”—Sciona brandished the page of notes on which she had aggressively circled her final version of Stravos’s imaging lines—“and I got this!” She lifted both hands triumphantly to the shapes of the Otherrealm before her. “You see? Those complicated, Stravos-exclusive lines clarify energy sources to perfection!
No blur, no spotty variations in brightness, no ambiguity at all. They just needed to be transcribed and translated for the spellograph just so.”
“Incredible…” Thomil was still staring into the coil, the shifting light pulsing white in the gray of his irises. “How does it work?”
“Well, it’s quite a bit longer than a standard mapping spell. There are more layers to it, including something Stravos calls a ‘pooling layer.’ Now I just have to decide what we even call this take on the Stravos Method since it’s so heavily reliant on Kaedor lines for compatibility with the
spellograph. Maybe Kaevos? Stravdor?”
“Stravdor?”
“Shut up—we’ll workshop it later.”
“Have you told anyone yet?” Thomil asked. “Archmage Bringham?”
“No, no. Not yet.”
“Why not?”
Sciona beamed. “Because I’m not done. I haven’t made my final stride.”
“Your final stride?”
“This”—she gestured to her divinely clear mapping visual—“is Stravos- level clarity filtered through the grayscale lens we apply to all modern mapping spells. For my final experiment, I’m going to do what we debated earlier: I’m going to remove those Faene-ordained lines that cloud the lens.
Thomil!” She gripped the Kwen’s shoulders and shook him—or would have had his body not been so damn solid. “We’re going to open a clear window to the Otherrealm! A Freynan Mirror!”
“So, you’ve decided that you’re all right with that?” Thomil said, and if Sciona didn’t know better, she would have said he looked proud of her.
“Modifying sacred spellwork?”
“Well, I’m not modifying, exactly, am I? I’m just restoring it to the way it was once upon a time in the Age of Founders. What could be holier than that?”
“And how do you know that a place like the Otherrealm can actually be seen?” Thomil asked. “How do you know our human eyes can take it?”
“I don’t,” Sciona whispered through an irrepressible grin. “Would you like to find out with me?”
“Damn it, Highmage Freynan…Of course I would.” And bless him; behind the veneer of calm, he looked almost as excited as she was. They had, after all, been working on this project together for the better part of three months. Here was the fruit of all their labor.
For once, Sciona typed a spell slowly, making sure she thought each line through to perfection and inserted her adjustments just so. Heart in her throat, she activated the mapping spell, and an image flared to life inside the
coil.
In color.
“All the gods!” Thomil breathed. “It is a window!”
“Yes!” Sciona’s voice cracked with emotion. “A clear, clear window!”
She was practically screaming, not caring who heard her, bouncing like a child as she clutched Thomil’s arm.
The Otherrealm wasn’t a sea of floating lanterns or a garden of never- before-seen colors, as some texts speculated. It was a rolling expanse of snow, breached in places by evergreen bushes and cut through with animal tracks. Sciona had only ever seen snow at a great distance, on the peaks of the Venhold Mountains. She hadn’t realized that up close, it would catch the light of the moon and sparkle like alchemical diamond dust. An unfamiliar creature bounded from the cover of one bush to the next, and, Feryn be praised, the image was so clear, Sciona could have counted the hairs on its bushy tail.
Thomil had gone still, his head tilted, and when Sciona stopped bouncing to look at him, she saw a strange expression on his face.
“It’s…”
“It’s what?” she asked when he trailed off.
“Why does it look so real?” A note of unease had crept into his voice.
“If this is another realm, why does it look just like ours?”
“Does it?” Sciona had never seen any field in the mortal realm that sparkled like that, but then again, she had never seen snow cover the
ground.
“It looks like the Kwen.”
“What?” Sciona said as Thomil’s arm went tense beneath her touch.
“Why would—”
“The Forbidden Coordinates…” he murmured beneath his breath. His brows knit together. “I always thought…Do you have an action spell ready for testing, ma’am?”
“Yes. Of course.” It was the simple, low-risk pushing spell she usually used to test an unknown sourcing method.
“Could you do something for me, Highmage Freynan? Could you siphon?”
“Sure.” Sciona had obviously been planning to test her new spell anyway.
Releasing Thomil’s strangely rigid arm, she put her hands to the Harlan 11, targeted a dense evergreen bush, and hit the siphoning key. The bush lit up bright white—beautiful Godly flame—and then unraveled like a ball of yarn thrown to the wind, leaves and fine splinters spiraling outward. Sciona had opened her mouth to exclaim in wonder when— Crash!
The image vanished as Thomil hurled the spellograph from the desk. It smashed into the nearest bookcase and broke. Screws and keys scattered in all directions.
“Thomil!” Sciona cried out over the ping of metal components on the lab floor. “What are you doing?”
Thomil was pale, shaking. His gray eyes had gone as wide as if he’d just
seen Hell itself.
“What is it?”
“That…” He pointed a trembling finger to the bent remnants of the mapping coil. “That was Blight!”
